Table of contents
Introduction
Are you thinking of starting a blog? Welcome to this wild and wacky alternative universe in which everyone is an author! Whether you’re here to share your passions, make money, raise awareness, or simply document your life’s journey, embarking on the blogging path is an exciting adventure. In this article, I’m looking at the various motivations behind starting a blog, and the different types of blogs that are out there, because this may impact on the best way for you to get started with blogging.
What is a Blog?
For the purposes of this article and anywhere else I use the word blog, this has a very specific meaning for me. It is a completely different thing than running a Facebook Page or group, or a YouTube, Instagram or TikTok channel.
When you have a blog, you have a space that is entirely your own on the Internet. You can set the format – you can include articles, poems, stories, images, sounds, video at your discretion, and design things exactly as you want them. Each post has its own link, and sits on your site permanently. You can categorise and tag all the posts so that people can find what they need and you can share the posts on all of your other social media channels as often as you want to. You can also choose to add adverts and links to other content if you want to, and there are many ways in which you can use a blog to make money.
I’m assuming if you are reading this that you either have a blog or that you are planning to set one up. In this series of articles i will cover how to set up your blog, what to write about, how to promote it, how to monetise it if you want to, and some of the technical aspects that you will need to know if you are going to be successful with blogging. But before you get started with blogging it’s a good idea to have a plan and to set out your intentions, as this can influence the choices that you may make when setting your blog up.
Finding Your Why: Understanding the Intentions Behind Blogging
First of all, I want you to consider why you are blogging and what you hope to get out of it. This is important, as your intentions for your blog will have an impact on the best way to structure it and set it up – and it will also feed into the subjects you will write about. All will become clear later, but let’s have a look at different reasons that people might have for starting a blog. See if you can identitfy yourself in one or more of these categories, as this will be helpful for you to set up the right blog structure later
1. Creative Outlet and Hobby Blogging
For many people, blogging starts out as a creative outlet – a space to express yourself, share insights, and indulge in the joy of creating. Hobby bloggers often start a blog purely for fun, to explore their interests, and engage with like-minded individuals. Sometimes it can be a safe place to experiment with words, poetry, music, art or photography, before looking to go out into the wider world and get published
2. Therapeutic and Accountability Blogging
Some individuals turn to blogging as a form of therapy, using it to process emotions, track personal growth, or hold themselves accountable to goals and aspirations. A popular form of this would be a weight loss or fitness blog, or one documenting a recovery from a mental or physical illness.
This blog type often starts as a personal diary or journal, being shared mainly with members of the community that you are a part of, who are treading the same path as you. For most bloggers in this niche I would expect it to be mainly a hobby blog, although some people who reach the end of the challenge they have set themselves, go on to become practitioners in that discipline and to offer coaching, training in that area, or sell products which they recommend for people on that journey.
3. Storytelling and Personal Narrative
Blogs serve as a platform for individuals to share their personal stories, experiences, and journeys. When I was younger it was quite normal to keep a diary or journal for yourself, and many people still do that, but others enjoy sharing their daily life stories in a public forum. Whether it’s documenting parenthood, overcoming personal challenges, or advocating for a cause, storytelling remains a powerful motivation for blogging.
The blogging community is very social, and it can be fun to share your insights on a particular topic or life stage that you are experiencing, and then read other people’s opinions in the same area.
For most people in this area, this remains a hobby – a place to vent, to give and receive advice and to find friends and allies. The parenting blogosphere is getting very crowded now – if your intention at the beginning is to make money with a blog in this niche, then you may find that you need to be a little bit more savvy about how you write , what specifically you write about, and aim your blogs at a certain type of reader. The days when you could be a successful parenting blogger and just write a diary of your days with your children, are sadly behind us. This is a difficult choice – you want it to be creative and fun and to be a journal of your family, but if you want it to grow and make money, then you may find that some of the fun and creative freedom will be lost.
4. Awareness and Advocacy
Many bloggers use their platforms to raise awareness about social issues, environmental concerns, political issues or humanitarian causes, especially if they have personal experience of the cause being promoted. Blogs can serve as a catalyst for change, sparking conversations and mobilising communities around important topics.
As a blogger with this intention, you maybe don’t want to sell anything from your blog, but you certainly want people to come and read it and to build a loyal following who will hopefully agree with you and support your cause. If this is you, then you should prbably consider your blog at least semi-serious from the outset, and pay attention to the sections later on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and traffic building, using social media and email marketing. You will need to master these skills to build your audience.
5. Business Promotion and Expertise Showcase
Entrepreneurs and professionals often use blogs to showcase their expertise, promote their businesses, and establish themselves as thought leaders in their respective fields. If your business has any kind of website, which you use to attract people to your offering, adding a blog to that website is great, because adding new things to a website regularly will keep your business relevant in the eyes of the Google bots. Also a blog is a great way to offer your prospects little titbits of your advice, and show and demonstrate your expertise and your personality, to persuade people to buy from you.
If you are here to just add a blog to a website you have already, then you do not need to worry about the hobby/semi-serious/business dimension – your blog is set up for business right from the word go.
6.Monetisation and Business Blogging
In the digital age, blogging has emerged as a lucrative avenue for making money and promoting businesses. Some individuals enter the blogging realm with the explicit intention of monetising their blog right from the start. There are many ways to monetise a blog – you can use advertisements or host sponsored content, as a starting point. Alternatively you can use your blog to sell products or services to your readers, whether that be physical or digital products, one to one coaching sessions, or group programmes.
If you are intending to monetise your blog, you will need to be very careful in the selection of your niche and the subjects that you blog about. You will need to study SEO and digital marketing very carefully in order to reach the specific people that will be interested in what you are selling.
Starting your Blog: Hobby, Semi-Serious, and Business Blogs
I’d like you to think about where exactly you sit on the spectrum between blogging for fun, and absolutely totally going all out to make money. I’m going to categorise it a bit, and split blogs into three categories – which I call hobby blog, semi-serious blog, and business blog.
These are completely my definitions – nobody else uses them, and it’s a spectrum rather than three absolutes – at the end of the day. It is possible to have a hobby blog and for it to become successful and make money. But if you’ve decided straight off that you want to make money, then it might be better off starting from a platform that is going to help you to do that, rather than starting off as a hobby blog and then finding out later on that you’ve got to upgrade and move everything you have done to a new platform when things get serious.
1. Hobby Blog
Characteristics:
- Primarily for personal enjoyment and self-expression.
- No strict schedule or commitment.
- Minimal focus on monetisation.
Recommendations:
If you fall into this category , you can do exactly what you like. Although I defined a blog above, if you are a hobbyist there is no reason why you shouldn’t host your musings on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, or somewhere else, if that makes you happy, or on one of the free blogging sites like WordPress.org or Blogger. You can blog about whatever you like, you can say whatever you want, you can blog as often as you want.
You don’t have to be regular. You don’t have to make a routine of it at this point.
Now, the downside of this is, if you’re doing just whatever you like on whatever platform you like, you will probably find it very hard to attract regular readers. If you’re blogging mainly on social media, especially if you’ve got a Facebook page, the only way you’re going to grow a Facebook page from scratch nowadays is either to just be completely completely original, amazing, and different, or to pay for advertising. Facebook shows posts on a page to less than 1% of people that like that page – it’s very hard to get seen.
Also, you may find on social media you can say a word that is the wrong word, and sometimes you get a ban slapped on you.You like too many posts, or follow too many people at once, you get a ban slapped on you. You say something that somebody in America considers to be inappropriate, even though it is perfectly normal in the UK, you get a ban slapped upon you.
Some of them I find very quite funny. I mean, I’m a member of several different groups. I very much enjoy reading about dogs. I have two dogs, I have a spaniel, and I’m in a group about spaniels, mainly because I like seeing the cute pictures. But quite often in that group, people are talking about breeding spaniels, and they use the word b*tch, because at the end of the day, b*tch is the word for a female dog, and it’s perfectly valid and correct to use that word when you’re talking about breeding spaniels. But the number of times that posts in that group get just taken down and randomly removed, and the people have a ban slapped on them because they dared to talk about their b*tch in a spaniel group…
And this is one of the best things about blogging – I can say whatever I want on my channel within reason, within the laws of libel and slander, but I know that my site is not going to be shut down by Facebook or Twitter or any of these American corporations that seem to decide what we can and cannot say anymore. I’ve bleeped out the word above because I want to share this on socials and I don’t want it to get me banned but I could in theory use that word quite happily (in a relevant place only – I’m not silly) and I won’t be shut down.
So in conclusion – if you want to start a blog as a hobby you can do it for free, do it very easily and make your own rules. But the downside is, you will find it hard to build a following and it is very unlikely to make money.
2. Semi-Serious Blog
Characteristics:
- Ambitious yet uncertain about monetisation potential.
- Willing to invest time and effort into learning, experimentation and repetition.
- Open to the idea of monetisation but not fully committed.
Recommendations:
A lot of people will have this intention starting up. I want to do this because I ‘ve heard it’s fun, but I’d also like to be one of those influencers that gets free stuff and makes money.
This is all well and good, and certainly possible – but you need to be aware at the start that while blogging is indeed fun, it takes quite a lot of work, effort and repetition to build the kind of platform that goes on to make money. If you are completely new to blogging and websites, there are quite a lot of technical things to learn and get to grips with, from designing your blog and setting up your platform, choosing the specific people you are writing for and writing blogs that people are likely to find and read. It is worh investing time and money into your blog if you are hoping that you are going to grow it.
You should definitely have your own website or blog platform and don’t just launch from a social media account. There are ways to make money directly from Instagram as you will see elsewhere on this site, but I do not feel that they fall into the category of blogging.
So choose your blog site – choose WordPress.com or Blogger if you want to start with a free site, but do also take a look at investing in a self-hosted site and buying your own domain name, even at the beginning. You can buy a domaiin name reasonably cheaply and many hosting sites have cheap annual packages for new customers. You can try it for a year, and if you’re not getting the results you want, then you haven’t invested too much.
Setting things up well in the beginning will give you an idea as to whether your blog is likely to succeed or not. Make sure you pick a specific niche – more on that in the next articles, and experiment with different formats, and social channels for promotion then use the Analytics on your site to see what works best for you.
3. Business Blog
Characteristics:
- Clear focus on monetisation and business promotion right from the start.
- Willing to invest in professional website design and hosting.
- Committed to building a brand and generating revenue.
Recommendation: If you don’t already have your own business website to host your blog on, opt for a self-hosted site immediately. I am very much in favour of WordPress – there is a bit of a learning curve with it, but it is very much more flexible than Squarespace, Wix and the other sites out there, although they also have thier fans.
If you are going out immediately with the intention to make money, be aware that writing blogs is only one very small part of what you will need to learn. You will have to prioritise SEO and content marketing strategies, master promotion on at least a couple of the social media channels and invest in building domain authority. You will also need to figure out what strategy you will use to generate revenue, and learn sales and digital marketing techniques to attract people to what you are offering.
I will be writing more about each of these topics in future editions and will link them in here once they are written.
Choosing Your Path: From Intention to Action
As you embark on your blogging journey, remember that your intentions shape your actions. Whether you’re blogging for pleasure, profit, or a combination of both, stay true to your goals and adapt your strategies accordingly. With dedication, creativity, and perseverance, your blog can become a powerful platform for self-expression, community engagement, and financial success.
So, having read this, are you clear on why you are starting a blog? Is it one of the reasons above, or something else? Whatever your reason may be, embrace it wholeheartedly, and let your blogging adventure begin!
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